


The Soul of A Heartless Being

by thefinaldigitofpi



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: Ahhhh lemme think, Dark, Gen, Post-Canon, Self Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, fairly gorey, pain/misery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-08 23:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4325100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefinaldigitofpi/pseuds/thefinaldigitofpi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skulduggery Pleasant is a man with a violent past. Why the hell wouldn't it haunt him at night? Especially after possibly the only person keeping him sane leaves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Soul of A Heartless Being

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally intended to develop into an actual plotline but unfortunately I'm too busy to regularly post updates. I may eventually get around to writing the story I had in mind, but as it stands it's just a dark, psycho one-shot

_Hopeless's turns to you, the ghost of a smile upon his face. But it isn't his smile. It's the smile_ you _once wore, back when you had a face, and lips to smile it with._  
_The battlefield has stopped around him, swords paused mid-swing, faces frozen in masks of rage._  
_The beam of energy hangs suspended in the air, inches from the back of Hopeless's head, and all he does is stare at you._

Wait, this isn't right. I wasn't here for this.

_"Yes you were," Hopeless says, and gestures to the other side of the field, where a creature wrapped in shadow stands atop a mountain of corpses, raining down it's judgement upon the world. "You were here. You probably felt it happen. Tell me, how did my death taste as you drank it in? Did you even notice the difference? Notice it was me?"_

Hopeless...

_"No, I won't let you escape the guilt this time. You escaped any punishment for what you did."_  
_His face had never sneered like that, and neither had yours, and it takes you a moment to recognise it as the sneer that the man who murdered your family once wore._

Please don't.

_"You were here. You were here and you didn't save me. All that power and you didn't save your friend. So now you get to see what your apathy caused."_  
_Time abruptly starts again, and Hopeless's head explodes, raining down on everyone around. Hopeless rains down on your skull, and you shouldn't be able to feel it, feel the blood as it runs over your teeth, feel the brain matter as it shoots through your eye socket and slaps against the inside of your skull, feel the flesh work it's way past your collar and slide down your spine, but you can, and you collapse, and you retched. You need to throw up, but Nefarian Serpine has taken even that from you, and now you look up to a completely different battlefield._

_Baron Vengeous stands on the other side of it, his cutlass raised over his head, poised to bring it down on the head of the man on his knees in front of him. The man's head is obscured by a burlap sack, but it is still undeniably Larrikin. He speaks in a terrified whisper, but somehow you can still hear him._  
_"I'm sure you found a way to deny Hopeless's death as you're fault. You were always good at dodging blame. But you were present for this, in every sense of the word."_

No! I will get there in time! I refuse to lose you!

_You run towards him, pushing warriors aside and dodging over, under and around attacks._

_"You've already lost me. You were too slow, I'm sure you remember."_

I'll get it right his time.

_It's too far, but you're still sprinting, even as the cutlass begins it's decent but you're almost there, you're so close and you push the air, but the tears you can't cry are obscuring your vision, and you can't see, you miss._

_"Too slow." The words come out of the Baron's mouth as his blade takes Larrikin's head, but it isn't the Baron anymore, it's your wife, and Larrikin isn't Larrikin anymore, it's your child, their head rolling away from their tiny body as your wife screams. She throws the cutlass at you, and it embeds itself in your skull and you scream, not in pain, but in the absence of it, because it isn't even remotely close to what you deserve, but now you're in a barn with a pale imitation of your partner, watching a monitor._  
_Erskine Ravel looks up at you from the screen._  
_"You know there was more than a few people you were too slow to save. I was another one. I waited for you. Waited for the rescue from you and had to settle for the Spiders that I got."_  
_Ghastly Bespoke and Anton Shudder are looking at you now too._  
_"If you had searched harder for him, had found him, he wouldn't be about to stab me in the back," says Ghastly._  
_"Or remove my head," says Anton._  
_Erskine does just that, plunging a short dagger directly into Ghastly's spine as Cleavers fall upon Shudder, their scythes slicing through his neck and sending his head sailing up through the screen to land behind you, and you turn to look at it, to pick it up, but now it's just a skull. It's your skull, and you only hold it for a moment before Darquesse plucks it from your hands and kisses the teeth, then lets it fall to the bitumen of the street you now stand on and turning to you._  
_"You could have prevented all this too," she says."_

How?

_"By putting your gun to her head and pulling the trigger the moment you found out what she was," Dexter Vex says, stepping out of a hole in a building. His face is a mess after Darquesse tore the Remnant from him, his lips split in many places, his jaw skewed violently to the left. There are very few teeth left in his mouth, and blood runs freely from every place that one is missing, bubbling out of his mouth as he talks, soaking his shirt and pooling at his feet._  
_"You could have saved thousands of lives if you hadn't let the heart you don't even have get in the way," he says. "You've heard the doctors talk about me, there's only so much they can do. I've got seventeen fake teeth, a few scars that would put Ghastly the same and I'll never be able to talk without feeling like a razor is being dragged up my throat, but goddamn, the skeleton can say he did the right thing."_  
_Darquesse just stands there smiling._

_And now finally you're here, with her, standing in her room, looking at each other. There is nothing to say._  
_You look at her mirror and see her reflection turn to look at you. And now you see yourself in the mirror, as you once were, with skin and hair, and your face. And you look back at her just in time to see her drop from the window._  
_You run to the window, open it, look out, but she's gone, she's gone and -_

When is she coming back? Is she coming back?

 

The skeleton stood up. He'd been sitting in the same spot for hours, but his meditation was over now.  
He walked to his closet and selected a charcoal suit with a red tie, and observed himself in the mirror. His head tilted a way it had never tilted before as he looked at himself, but what emotion he was feeling was anyone's guess.  
Turning away from his reflection, he walked to a small desk and opened the ornate box on top of it, removing the gun inside. He opened one of the drawers in the desk and removed bullets, calmly loading the gun and sliding it into it's holster and depositing the rest of the bullets into his pocket and left the house without a hat for the first time in nearly a century.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arggh I'm so ashamed. So I wasn't paying proper attention to the canon when I wrote this chapter and apparently Larrikin died defending Dexter from Serpine's red hand. But it's too late now and I can't be bothered to fix it, sorry about that. Other than that mistake, this story is pretty much canon compliant. Sorry again.


End file.
